Iraq off the rails: should we stay or should we go? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

For the last few months, since the Iraqi election in December, we've all lived with the sense that something bleak and horrible would happen to prove that the Iraq war effort truly was doomed.  The fear was driven by brooding conviction that despite the bright pronouncements of the Bush Administration about Iraq's standing up for itself, the country's weak security forces, unreliable leaders, ethnic fragmentation, militant clerics, and uncontrollable militias made the path to stability a bridge too far.

Now is time to dispense with the fear and start dealing with reality.  I've been talking for a long-time about the adverse consequences of Iraq's spiraling into a failed state.   I am convinced that all of these risks I listed out last August are still staring us in the face.    But what's becoming more questionable by the day are whether the 130,000 US forces in Iraq are any longer the finger in the dike they have been for the last 3 years.

Over the last few days, the principle concern in Iraq has not been violent and determined insurgents, but rather ordinary Iraqis - Sunni and Shiite - who have gotten caught in a escalating spiral of violence triggered by Wednesday's bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra.  Experts agree that American soldiers cannot interpose themselves between battling Sunnis and Shiites.

That's why, over the last few days, rather than trying to restore calm American commanders have largely kept their troops away from the hot-zones, knowing that a US presence would only further stoke tensions.  The Iraqi security forces, even if they possessed the skill and firepower to intervene, are so thoroughly riddled with partisan militiamen that they too may prove close to useless.   Some fear that if the conflict continues to boil, the Iraqi army may split apart.

Another major concern is the impact of these sectarian skirmishes on the formation of a new Iraqi government, a process that has already taken nearly three months  and has been setback significantly by the outbreak during the last few days.  Sunnis have formally pulled out of talks on how to allocate government ministries, and even if they return it seems unlikely that the Shiite victors will now readily turn over enough key ministries to allow for true power-sharing.

Some deep voices of Iraqi leaders have called for restraint, and its possible they'll manage to tamp down tensions.  This time.   But because they'll reassure ordinary citizens with the promise of protection from sectarian private armies, the crisis this week seems destined to repeat itself.

So where does this leave all our teeth-gnashing about whether the US should stay or go?  I have for the last six months or so argued that if an increasingly implausible set of conditions could suddenly arise, it would render our presence in Iraq a worthwhile bulwark against civil war.  I've proposed benchmarks for staying in, none of which appear to have been met.  Kevin Drum reports that we're now down from one fully combat-ready standalone Iraqi battallion in December to zero today.

At this point, on the one hand its starting to look like the US presence in Iraq isn't doing much good:  we're paralyzed in the face of the worst military crisis the country has confronted, our troops holed up in barracks for fear that getting involved would only make things worse.  On the other hand, were we to leave now in significant numbers, its hard to escape the sense that we'd be pulling out just as Iraq collapses.  Even the White House doesn't seem to have arrived at a way to spin this.

The hope is, of course, that Iraqi political leaders and clerics will succeed in their call for calm, securing a hiatus in widescale sectarian bloodshed.   If that happens, we need to look seriously at whether there's any justification for continuing to put American troops at risk.  The Administration's "strategy" - after dozens of reformulations and refinements - is failing.  Its possible that the tactics being used now could have worked if adopted earlier, but they aren't equal to righting Iraq in its present condition.  With a failing strategy, we will not succeed.

The only thing worse than Iraq as a failed state is Iraq as a failed state with 130,000 Americans living there.

Looking on the bright side of an Iraqi Civil War Posted by Suzanne Nossel

We usually avoid this sort of thing here, by I couldn't help myself when Chris Borgen over at Opinio Juris sent me a link to a post there by Kevin Jon Heller.

Bush responsibility for a weak UN Human Rights Council Posted by Jeffrey Laurenti

Mort Halperin, in bringing to this blog the insights of Human Rights Watch's Larry Moss on the negotiations for a United Nations Human Rights Council, underscores the issues on how the Council will be only modestly improved over the 60-year-old Human Rights Commission it's intended to replace. The obvious question is why the reform is so modest.

And the bottom-line answer is: John Bolton.

Bolton, of course, is simply the personification of a broader Bush administration strategy of confrontation and steam-rollering. That strategy backfired in the reform negotiations for the September summit, as it has repeatedly in other foreign-policy debacles, and the watering down of Kofi Annan's ambitious plan to upgrade international human rights machinery is just the latest proof.

We could have had a strong Human Rights Council approved when national leaders were in town in New York in September, wrapped into a summit package that repeated previously agreed commitments on development goals, development aid, and nuclear controls. But John Bolton -- who by all accounts really reports to Dick Cheney, not the Secretary of State -- insisted on waging war against the development goals and aid targets, derailing the tentatively agreed package. That sent the poor majority of countries into immediate opposition, and wholesale deletions of proposals and commitments followed -- a "race to the bottom" in the summit declaration. And once the summit was over, the details of the Human Rights Council could only be traded off against other details of the Council -- not against assistance for the development priorities that poorer countries care most passionately about.

So, deprived of leverage, having no sweeteners to give in exchange for a body that will dispense human rights condemnations, Western negotiators have had to give way on the size of the majorities that would be required for election, on the time the Council would be in active session, on the rigor of standards for membership, etc.

Moreover, as Mort and Larry pointed out, after all the reform debate about making membership on the new Council conditional on meeting fundamental human rights standards, Bolton astonished the international community by floating a proposal to seat the five permanent members of the Security Council permanently on the Human Rights Council. That, plus the US coolness to the calls by human rights reformers and Kofi Annan for competitive electdions to the Council settled by a two-thirds majority vote, exposed the Bush administration's recognition of the glaring weakness of its own human rights record. The government that trumpets democracy promotio is now so associated worldwide with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that it fears it cannot win an election against Sweden or Germany or Ireland for a seat on the Council.

Thus goes American "leadership" in the first decade of the 21st century.

Missing the Boat on Port Security Posted by Lorelei Kelly

For the first time, it seems, the adroit operatives of the Bush Administration have landed in the middle of the intersection of politics and policy--and now know what it feels like to be T-boned by a truck.  Make that a sea-faring vessel.  The sale of six US ports to an Arab company has both  Republicans and Democrats doing cartwheels while hyperventilating while watching their 06 poll numbers.

This is not a wise nor a measured response.  In contrast, it is lazy and opportunistic and does nothing to address the overriding challenge of achieving port security.  Instead of educating the public about needed policy reforms, such posturing scares Americans and brings out the worse kind of isolationism. There's a pattern here. Remember last year, when Congress blocked the sale of American company  UNOCAL to a Chinese buyer but said nothing about our wacky budget and the fact that China owns billions and billions of US debt?  Well, the ports sale goes into the same easy political in-box: If Congress screams enough about selling American property to Arabs, maybe nobody will notice the fact that five years after 9/11 we still don't have a well-funded and comprehensive port security plan.  At least the President has something in mind, the National Strategy for Maritime Security. Congress, meanwhile, is so stingy with the Coast Guard that the agency can't live up to its own congressional mandated port security duties.

The UN Human Rights Council Posted by Morton H. Halperin

Lawrence C. Moss, who is representing Human Rights Watch in the negotiations to create a new UN Human Rights Council, has written the following piece about the ongoing negotiations:

There are many officials of good will in the Bush Administration who do want, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told congressional hearings last week, to create a new UN Human Rights Council (HRC) which would be a substantial improvement on the existing Commission on Human Rights.  However, it is hard to see how that objective has been furthered by the stance taken by the United States in the negotiations in New York.

As its solution to the problem of improving the membership of the new body and preventing the election of inappropriate countries, the US has clung single-mindedly to a proposal to bar the election to the HRC of countries currently under sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council for human-rights related reasons.  As Secretary Rice acknowledged, this proposal has proven highly unpopular.  Many UN member states were reluctant to give the already very powerful Security Council new power to bar countries from serving on the HRC, and observed that the five permanent members of the Security Council (the “P-5”) would never be under sanctions and thus barred.  This concern was exacerbated by US Ambassador John Bolton’s proposal, to presume the P-5 will always be entitled to serve on the Council.  As this proposal would award permanent seats to China and Russia, however poor their human rights records might be or one day become,  it only made the US look hypocritical.

Fukuyama or Berman: Whose History is Ended? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Mike Signer says that Frank Fukuyama is a closet liberal.  Derek Chollet sees Fukuyama's Sunday Times mea culpa as a sign of a "conservative crack-up."  Ivo Daalder writes that Fukuyama "gets it."

But I want to compare and contrast what I've been calling Fukuyama's "munchkin mea culpa"

The way the Cold War ended... created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from the outside.  The model for this was Romania under the Ceaucescus:  once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation.

with another apologia that was published last year:  Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists: or the Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath. 

Berman traces at some length the arc of one set of Left thought, from 1960s and 1970s radicalism to a return to institutions of power in the 1980s, to the at-first hesitant embrace of force in the Balkans in the 1990s, to -- in his case, and others -- support for the Iraq war on humanitarian and human rights grounds.

One hopes that the forthcoming book from which Fukuyama's essay was drawn contains something analogous -- and as well-written -- on the evolution of the neo-cons from the sons of Trotskyites to, as he calls Kagan and Kristol, "Leninists."

Yet Fukuyama is already on to the next solution -- "a 'realistic Wilsonianism' that better matches means to ends" -- while for Berman, history has ended.  Berman's book is ultimately an elegy for a worldview that he concludes died with Sergio de Mello and his team in the UN compound in Baghdad in 2003:

The truck-bomb killed the very people whose job would have required them to labor day and night to reconcile the American-led overthrow of the dictator with the principles and legalities and political realities of the UN – a reconciliation that would have brought together, as well, the more militant ‘68ers with the more prudent and cautious ‘68ers, the antitotalitarian left with the antitotalitarian left.  The story of the generation of 1968 ended there, surely.  In Baghdad in August 2003.

You sense the difference.  Berman, and in a different way George Packer's The Assassins' Gate, wrote an elegy for what was lost, what might have been.  Fukuyama, on the other hand, has dusted himself off, and --with all the energy that wonderful munchkin metaphor implies -- is on to the next challenge.

And that prefigures a big problem for the intellectual left:  can its members convince themselves that it's possible to keep the past in sight and still look ahead?

Fukuyama the Liberal? Posted by Michael Signer

On the Francis Fukuyama New York Times Magazine piece about the crack-up of neoconservatism:  if you haven't read it, do.  It's significant equally as an analysis of the structural flaws in modern neoconservatism (which must be distinguished, as Fukuyama argues, from original neoconservatism) and as a political event in its own right -- a more-than-public (indeed, it reads more as a cry for help) manifestation of Fukuyama's own pronouncement that the "neoconservative moment seems to have passed." 

I talked with Fukuyama at a wedding a year and a half ago, and was struck then by his anguish at the Administration's failure adequately to understand and plan for the insurgency.  What I want to talk about here is whether Fukuyama has erred in devising an overly complex conceptual apparatus (as political theorists sometimes do) that diagnoses as an ideological mistake what is actually an intellectual problem.   Fukuyama makes these mistakes because, in trying to move away from neoconservatism, he cannot release himself from its most basic premise -- that history stems from ideas, and that the perfect idea will solve all problems. 

All of this is ironic because Fukuyama seems to have embraced the basic liberal notion of America's careful, thoughtful governance of a liberalizing world community.  If he could release from the neocon framework, he just might emerge (probably to his own dismay) as a progressive.

A Conservative Crack-up? Posted by Derek Chollet

Anyone who has tuned in to the discussion about politics and foreign policy here in Washington knows that things tend to circle back to a couple basic questions: when will progressives get their act together, and how will the Democrats overcome their perceived weaknesses in national security?  Obviously we welcome this debate -- one of the reasons for establishing this blog was to create a place for such discussions to play out.  Yet while there is certainly plenty of reason for more soul-searching on the progressive side (don’t worry, DA ain’t going anywhere), folks are starting to notice something equally interesting and consequential: the fissures in the conservative movement. 

We're seeing this in the debate about the NSA domestic surveillance program, the torture and detainee issue, what to do about Iraq and Iran, and how (and even whether) the U.S. should work to promote democracy abroad.

It’s not just progressives who are grappling with how to respond to a Bush Doctrine that stresses democracy promotion, pre-emption, and unchecked executive power; the conservatives are divided too – and this internal struggle will only grow more intense and bitter as the 2008 election approaches.

As the New Republic’s Josh Kurlantzick explained recently in must-read cover story, “for four years after the Bush Doctrine's inception, the GOP had maintained impressive intraparty unity on foreign policy, uniting Christian social conservatives, neoconservatives, traditional realists, and libertarian-minded business Republicans. This was the result of many factors, including Bush's immense personal popularity, a rally-round-the-flag effect from the war on terrorism, the predominance of Iraq over all other foreign policy issues, and the fact that moderates in the Bush administration, such as Colin Powell, were marginalized within the bureaucracy.”

“But, now, other schools of foreign policy thought are emerging within the GOP… Pragmatic Republicans have realized that the Bush Doctrine cannot be easily applied to other foreign policy crises, such as Iran, and potential 2008 presidential candidates have begun thinking through their foreign policy positions.”

Kurlantzick argues that conservatives are dividing into three camps: transformationalists, like Condoleezza Rice, who embrace the Bush Doctrine’s ambitions but value alliances; nationalists, like George Allen, who have less patience for multilateralism and stress more traditional state-centered threats, like a rising China; and traditional realists, who articulate the kind of pragmatic, less-ambitious, “humble” policy along the lines of what Bush entered office espousing.

Shoot to kill in Chicago Posted by Morton H. Halperin

Does the president have the right to order the military to shoot a citizen on the streets of Chicago? Could a judge order him not to?  Could Congress pass a law prohibiting such shootings that President Bush would feel that he had to obey?

Regretfully, we have come to the point where these are no longer hypothetical questions.

After all, the legal theory put forward by the administration to justify warrantless surveillance, torture, and detention of "combatants" does not seem to have any limits, and the president did order the military to seize a citizen in Chicago and lock him in a military prison without any right of judicial review and in violation of an explicit law banning such detentions. When the case finally got to court the government transferred Mr. Padilla to a regular prison in the hope of avoiding review.  (The Supreme Court is still considering the case.)

Attorney General Gonzales, at the recent Judiciary Committee hearing, declined to provide a direct answer on this question, saying it was not part of the warrantless surveillance program that he was discussing.  He seemed to admit that there were other "programs" that he was not discussing, so this provided little comfort.  Moreover, another official in a closed session apparantly did concede what is obvious to any careful reader of the administration's statements, namely, that there is no way to distinguish the right to order assasinations from other powers that the President has claimed.

10 Signs UN Reform is Alive Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I spent this weekend at a conference organized by the Stanley Foundation on UN Reform.  Stanley is deeply valued at the UN for convening in-depth, substantive sessions that are small enough to allow participants to engage and actually reach decisions.   David Shorr, an occasional guest-blogger here, has masterminded these UN events in recent years.  This weekend he and Stanley Foundation President Dick Stanley focused on the nuts and bolts of how to streamline the thousands of UN mandates that have accumulated over the years.   

They convened a group including a dozen UN ambassadors from major countries (none with mustaches), a handful of their deputies, a few top Secretariat and US government officials, one academic and one blogger.   For me it was a chance to delve back into reform issues 5 years after completing negotiations at the US Mission to the UN to reform the organization's financial system in 2001.   Here are 10 reasons why the weekend left me somewhat heartened on prospects for UN reform:

1.  With the spotlight gone, important hard work is actually getting done - Many of us despaired last Fall when the UN's historic reform summit ended with a whimper.  With world leaders missing the chance to endorse an ambitious program, reform seemed bound to die.  But it hasn't.  Wading through thousands of UN mandates to decide what to kill is tedious, daunting and vitally necessary.  The UN deserves major kudos for plunging into this head-on.   There's also hope of major progress on a reformed Human Rights Council as soon as this week.

2.  The top people in the UN Secretariat are seized with reform - The UN seems to have woken up, smelled the Kofi, and realized that it needs turn itself around or risk extinction.  The UN's best people are now focused on reform which, just 5 years ago, was n unsexy backwater that highflyers avoided at all costs.  When I asked whether a certain charismatic, high-ranking UN official was involved in the reform effort, the answer was "everyone is."

3.  Member States are engaged in reform at a higher level than ever - To see a group of top ambassadors devote a holiday weekend to the intricacies of criteria for retiring outdated UN mandates was impressive.  In 2000-01, ambassadors would step in only at the literal midnight hour; usually Christmas Eve when failure to reach decisions meant spoiled holidays and no budget for the new year.  The dominance of low-level, less accountable delegates bedeviled many a reform debate.   Having ambassadors around the table is a huge improvement.

4.  Key member states now care about how the UN is perceived (especially on the Hill and by the US public) - When I served at the US Mission, other delegations took offense if we brought up the expectations and demands of Congress or the US public about UN reform.  Our domestic political dramas were no concern of theirs.  Now, delegations from around the world - including developing countries - speak of the need to demonstrate publicly that the organization is changing, and to adduce tangible evidence that old habits are being broken.   This is a potentially big breakthrough.

5.  Mistrust of the US is forcing the American delegation to make compromises - There was lots of talk about suspicion and polarization at the UN being at an all-time high.  This is countries' polite way of saying they're mad as hell at us.  Countries demanded so-called confidence building measures by the US as a precondition for their willingness to engage on a reform agenda that, on its surface, means making the UN more focused and efficient, but that many countries fear is a veil for cost-cutting and shortchanging developing countries' priorities.  The US knows its radioactive and needs to show flexibility to get others to play ball.

A Muslim Secretary General? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Steve Clemons over at the Washington Note has a very interesting run-down (at the end of the post) of the emerging candidates to be the next UN Secretary General, including the intriguing point that most of the first-tier contenders are Muslim.  Read it and be the first on your block to be dropping the names; for more, here is a Richard Holbrooke commentary on the subject, and here, god bless, is an entire website devoted to the horserace. 

Of course, to derive the maximum benefits from a Muslim ascending to the top slot, it would be helpful for the person not to appear to be America's hand-picked Muslim.  Is our diplomacy up to that?

Two Olympic postscripts:  I'm looking forward to seeing what non-profits pick up quickly on the Joey Cheek phenomenon (nice finish in the 1000.)  And, on a cultural note, the next time someone tells you that European culture is inherently less tacky than ours, do refer them to... ice dancing.

Happy Monday.